Studies Cite Learning Gains In Direct Instruction Schools

Schools using Direct Instruction, a teaching method sometimes
criticized for its tightly scripted teaching lessons, are generally
seeing gains in student learning, according to a new package of studies
that tracked the program in Florida, Maryland, and Texas.

The studies, published this month in the Journal of Education for
Students Placed at Risk, are important, experts said, because they
represent the first published empirical research on the program, or
adaptations of it, in more than a decade.

They look at districts in four locations—Baltimore; Broward
County, Fla.; Fort Worth, Texas; and Houston—in which anywhere
from six to 30 schools began using the program in the 1990s.

"Direct Instruction is a powerful tool, and educators have a right
to know it's out there. Some may choose it and some may not," said
Muriel V. Berkeley, the president of the Baltimore Curriculum Project,
a nonprofit group supporting efforts to put the program in place in 16
schools in that city.

As promising as the test-score gains look, however, commentators on
both the pro and con sides of the debate over the controversial school
improvement program said they are not the last word on the program's
effectiveness.

The findings are inconclusive, educators said, for a variety of
reasons. In Broward County, results were hard to disentangle because
the program was combined with other educational innovations. Other
studies either focused only on the early elementary grades or looked at
programs that were not implemented as faithfully as program developers
might have hoped, experts said.

"We do the best we can with what we've got, and we don't give up
because we don't have perfect studies," said Martha Abele Mac Iver, who
helped edit the special issue and was a co-author of one of the studies
in it.

Developed more than 30 years ago by Sigfried Engelmann, Direct
Instruction is used in thousands of schools nationwide. It is one of
only a handful of comprehensive school reform models cited for having a
solid research base. Critics up until now, however, have complained
that many of the studies were old. ("A Direct Challenge," March 17,
1999.)

Better Than What?

In her study, which was conducted with Elizabeth Kemper, a
researcher at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, Ms. Mac Iver
focused on Baltimore, where six of the city's lowest-achieving schools
began using Direct Instruction programs in the fall of 1996.

The researchers found that students who started in the program as
kindergartners that year were reading on grade level by the end of 3rd
grade, and children who came to Direct Instruction in 2nd grade were
reading close to grade level by 5th grade.

But so were children in six other demographically matched schools
that were using a different reading curriculum with systematic phonics
instruction.

"There's evidence here that Direct Instruction is definitely helping
some of the students," said Ms. Mac Iver, an associate research
scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "The issue we still
need to ferret out is whether they're doing significantly better than
students getting other types of instruction."

Ms. Berkeley noted, however, that the numbers don't tell the whole
story in Baltimore, where the program's implementation and success
rates have varied from school to school—especially in the early
implementation years.

At poverty-ridden City Springs Elementary School, one of the first
such schools, reading scores have climbed from among the district's
lowest to its fifth highest. In others, the program seems to have had
less of an impact.

In Houston, on the other hand, where some of the district's most
disadvantaged schools began using Direct Instruction reading techniques
with pupils in kindergarten, 1st grade, and 2nd grade through a program
called Rodeo Institute for Teacher Excellence, or RITE, the positive
results seemed clearer. The number of schools using the program in that
city grew from six in the fall of 1996 to 20 in 2001.

As part of their evaluation, researchers from the Texas Institute
for Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistics at the University of
Houston compared the gains that program students made on state reading
tests and other measures with those for children in other schools with
the same socioeconomic makeups.

They concluded that the RITE program accelerated the pace of
students' prereading and reading skills in kindergarten and 1st grade.
What's more, the students whose scores improved the most were those who
had been in the program the longest.

Even though the rate of growth for the program participants slowed
in 2nd grade, the researchers noted, the nonprogram students still had
not caught up to them by the end of that year.

Researchers documented similar gains in Fort Worth, where 61 schools
in 1998 adopted either Direct Instruction reading programs or the Open
Court reading program, a commercial program that also teaches reading
systematically. Compared with students in more traditional reading
classes, the study found, kindergarten and 1st grade students in both
of the new reading programs did better on nationally normed reading
tests.

Testing Caveats

However, in a commentary on all of the studies, Barak Rosenshine
suggests the two Texas studies didn't go far enough because they
assessed students only through 2nd grade.

Testing should go through 3rd or 4th grade, when students move from
simply decoding words to understanding what they mean, said Mr.
Rosenshine, a professor emeritus of educational psychology at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Both studies are ongoing, and findings for later years are yet to
come.

Jerry Silbert, who wrote college textbooks on Direct Instruction and
has helped implement its use, said that some of the districts studied
were using only a narrow slice of the more comprehensive Direct
Instruction model, which now spans a wide range of subjects and grade
levels. He also noted that in Fort Worth, teachers only received
one-fifth of the level of coaching that program developers
recommend.

Vol. 21, Issue 31, Page 15

Published in Print: April 17, 2002, as Studies Cite Learning Gains In Direct Instruction Schools

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